Apply for Cambridge Writers’ Workshop 2017 Internships by September 15, 2017!

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to announce two new internship positions.  Apply for our Graphic Design or Editing and Communications Intern positions by September 15, 2017!  Interns can be based in Cambridge, MA or can remote commute.

Graphic Design Internship

apply

Hours: 5-10 hours per week (Cambridge, MA or remote commuting)
Duration: 1 year (renewable)
Deadline & Guidelines: Applications are due September 15, 2017. Submit a cover letter, resume and portfolio online to cww.submittable.com.

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, Inc. seeks interns for our creative media team.

Responsibilities include:

  • Attending regular meetings with the executive board
  • Designing clear and engaging graphic communications for print and web. This will include logos, branded promotional items, web site and social media graphics, posters, flyers, and other marketing materials as needed
  • Basic HTML coding
  • Researching creative inspiration
  • Reading and following art and design news

Ideal candidates:

  • Proficient in Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop and InDesign)
  • Basic knowledge of HTML
  • Knowledge of Illustrator
  • Experience producing content on a timely basis
  • Possess energy, enthusiasm, sense of humor, people skills, creativity
  • Have organizational skills, strict attention to detail, & ability to meet deadlines
  • Interest or experience in publishing

Address the following questions in your cover letter:

  1. What makes you excited about interning with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop?
  2. How will your skills help us as an organization?
  3. What skills do you hope to gain from your experience with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop?

Please also include a portfolio with 3-5 posters, flyers or other marketing material samples you have previously completed.

apply

* This is an unpaid internship but course credit or Federal Work Study hours and course credit may apply.  Please inquire about details at directors@cambridgewritersworkshop.org

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Editing & Communications Internship

apply

Hours: 5-10 hours per week (Cambridge, MA or remote commuting)
Duration:
 6 months (renewable)
Deadline & Guidelines:  
Applications due September 15, 2017.  Submit a cover letter and résumé online to cww.submittable.com.

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, Inc. seeks interns for our editing & communications team.  Interns will gain experience in:

  • Copyediting promotional materials (print & web)
  • Formatting pieces for the web
  • Editing and generating web content (blogging about literary topics)
  • Editing and generating newsletter content
  • Contributing to our Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook pages
  • Attending regular meetings with the executive board

Ideal candidates:

  • Possess energy, enthusiasm, sense of humor, people skills, creativity
  • Have organizational skills, strict attention to detail, & ability to meet deadlines
  • Have fluency in internet and social media (esp. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and WordPress)
  • Strong interest editing/publishing experience
  • Experience with Photoshop & HTML helpful but not necessary

Address the following questions in your cover letter:

1.  What makes you excited about interning with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop?
2.  How will your skills help us as an organization?
3.  What skills do you hope to gain from your experience with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop?

apply
*  This is an unpaid internship but Federal Work Study hours may apply.  Please inquire about details at directors@cambridgewritersworkshop.org

CWW Summer in Granada Writing Retreat- Aug 4 2017: Storyteller’s Voice, Poetry of Flamenco, & Roma Caves Tour

Today, we started off our day unpacking the elements of The Storyteller’s Voice with Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich.  After enjoying this craft of writing seminar in our classroom overlooking the Alhambra, we enjoyed a lunch break and some free writing time.  We re-convened later in the afternoon for a class on The Evocative Poetry of Flamenco with Diana Norma Szokolyai, who taught about the history of flamenco and its influence on the musical and literary landscape.  We analyzed a variety of forms presented in flamenco lyrics, before setting off for Sacromonte to hike to the museum of the Roma caves.  After visiting several traditional Roma cave dwellings, we went to one of the most well known cuevas, Cueva de la Rocio to enjoy a spectacular performance of Zambra, a traditional Roma (“Gypsy”) wedding dance.  After the performance, we went to the Mirador San Nicolas for a stunning night view of the Alhambra and enjoyed the evening artist market.

-Diana Norma Szokolyai, Granada 2017

CWW Summer in Granada Writing Retreat- Aug. 3 2017: Character Development & Writing from your Senses in the City of Pomegranates

Granada. City that is a feast for the senses, city that pulls you into its perfumed streets, filled with the foglight of frankincense and the pepper of flamenco music.  We started Thursday off with an intensive class taught by Rita Banerjee on Character Development & the Law of Desire.  After breaking for lunch and some time to write our character sketches, we re-convened for Tim Horvath’s class on Writing from Your Senses. During the class, we examined a variety of literary texts, as well as sampled tantalizing chocolate from a world class chocolatier and some handmade by CWW Artistic Director Diana Norma Szokolyai just days before in a chocolate factory in a small mountain village, Mijas.  Cacao, ginger, chile, sea salt, essential oil of lemon, corn nuts, blueberries…these were just some of the flavorful notes that we tasted.  As we went through all of the senses, we were surprised by some I Hate Perfume scents that evoked literary landscapes from novels or particular seasons and decades.  At night, we went on a tapas tour and enjoyed sampling local sangria, wine, tinto de verano, clara (lemonade and beer) and cañas.  The colorful street markets were a delight to explore as we sampled local cheeses and tapas.  It was a day full of sensorial experiences to feed our writing.

-Diana Norma Szokolyai, Granada

CWW Summer in Granada – August 2 – Orientation, Toasts, Trick Candles, and Live Jazz

On August 2, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Summer in Granada Writing Retreat officially kicked off with our merry band of writers, musicians, and instructors.  Orientation took place right out side the gardens of the Alhambra where writers had an opportunity to meet and greet their instructors.  During toasts with our poison of choice, tinto de veranos, we also celebrated the birthdays of Tim Horvath, Maggie Downs, and Leah Harris in style with pionono cakes and trick candles!  Afterwards we strolled downtown to the Plaza Nueva to rendezvous with our favorite jazz and flamenco musicians, Dennis Shafer and Victor Pachas, and enjoyed the treat of writing to their beautiful music!

Announcing New Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Faculty for Fall 2017 Workshops & Retreat

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to announce the following poets and writers will be joining our Fall 2017 Faculty for our classes in Cambridge, MA at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education (September 23 – December 2, 2017) and our Harvest Creative Writing Retreat in Rockport, MA (October 12-15, 2017).

Maya Sonenberg’s first story collection, Cartographies, received the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. At the time, she was the youngest author to have received this prize. Her second collection, Voices from the Blue Hotel, appeared in 2007, and her chapbook of fiction and drawings, 26 Abductions, was published by The Cupboard in 2015. A second chapbook, After the Death of Shostakovich Père, won the 2016 PANK [CHAP]book contest and will appear in fall of 2017. Other stories and essays have appeared widely, in such journals as Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, The Literarian, New Ohio Review, and Hotel Amerika, and she has received grants from King County 4Culture and Artists Trust. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington—Seattle, and is currently at work on a book about her grandmother, Laura Ingalls Wilder (both the author and the character), and Jewish utopian settlements in the Dakotas during the late 19th century.

meganfernandes_newbioimage2015Megan Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College and teaches courses on poetry, feminist theory, and science and technology studies. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is the author of The Kingdom and After(Tightrope Books 2015), the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011), and the author of two poetry chapbooks: Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes Me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Boston Review, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Pank Magazine, The Walrus Magazine, Postmodern Culture, Guernica, Memorious, the Academy of American Poets, Redivider, the California Journal of Poetics, among others.

screen-shot-2016-09-27-at-10-52-49-amFrederick-Douglass Knowles II (Yesod) is a Poet-Educator-Activist involved in Community Education and the Performing Arts. He has competed on three National Poetry Slam Teams (2x Connecticut and Brooklyn, NY). His works have featured in the Martin Luther King Jr. Anthology by Yale University Press, East Haddam Stage Company of Connecticut, The 13th Annual Acacia Group Conference at California State University, Folio– a Southern Connecticut State University literary magazine, Lefoko—a Botswana (Southern Africa) Hip-Hop magazine and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: AIDS Anthology by Third World Press. Frederick-Douglass is currently an English Professor at Three Rivers Community College where he infuses English Composition with social injustices, such as AIDS, Poverty and War. His debut collection of autobiographical poetry, Black Rose City, was currently released by Author House.

Janaka Stucky is an American poet, performer, and publisher. The founding editor of Black Ocean, as well as the annual poetry journal, Handsome, he is also the author of a few poetry collections. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by The Huffington Postand The Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted “Boston’s Best Poet” in The Boston Phoenix.  In 2015, Jack White’s Third Man Recordslaunched a new publishing imprint, Third Man Books, and chose Janaka’s full-length poetry collection, The Truth Is We Are Perfect, as their inaugural title. Janaka’s poems are at once incantatory, mystic, and epigrammatic. His esoteric & occult influences, combined with a mesmeric approach to performance, create an almost ecstatic presence on stage.

CWW Board Member Gregory Crosby’s poem “A Volta” feat. on Nevada Public Radio

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to announce that Gregory Crosby, a member of our Executive Board, has a stunning new poem, “A Volta,” featured on Nevada Public Radio.  Crosby writes:

A Volta

The old man folded his newspaper
& asked, “Can God make a prison so
secure even He can’t break out of it?”
Well, what do you think the universe is?
We’re all on the yard together; only
some of us, those who thirst & grasp after
power, labor under the impression
that we’re the guards. A little bird flew by,
too fast to identify. The coffee
cooled past the point of no return… unless
you asked the waitress for a warm-up.
There’s always a point of return; it’s just
that you may not be the one to turn back, to
twist your head to catch one last glimpse of grace.

Read “A Volta,” on Nevada Public Radio here.

Gregory Crosby is a member of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Executive Board and the author of the chapbooks Spooky Action at a Distance (2014, The Operating System) and the forthcoming The Book of Thirteen (2016, Sylph Press); his poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Leveler, Sink Review, Ping Pong, & Rattle. He teaches creative writing at Lehman College, City University of New York.  You can follow him on Twitter here.

CWW Alumni News: Aaron Graham’s Poetry featured in Sequestrum Magazine

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to announce that two recent poems, “Mythos (Deployment)” and “Footfalls” by Aaron Graham, an alum of our Spring in New Orleans Writing Retreat, has been featured in Sequestrum Magazine.  On the poems, Graham writes:

The first thing that actually was able to speak to me, that I was able to relate to after I got out of the Marine Corps was Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was something about the work that spoke to me, that knew me, and that I just inherently understood. “Footfalls” is sort of an attempt to repay the favor in as much as its an attempt to convey some of my experiences with “Burials for the dead” and “Unreal Cities” using a tone and diction that flowed from the intensity of The Waste Land.  Or at least in my mind it did.

I suppose, thematically speaking, “Mythos” is almost a counterpoint to “Footfalls.” It’s really dealing with the notion of this incredible weight of history in the Middle East—really in the land itself in the grains of sand and the Tigress’ silt—possesses. To think the road the unit was patrolling was walked by the Prophet of Islam or that a few miles from the spot I was standing on the Apostle Paul was struck by God on the way to Damascus was—and even still is—jarring. These are still parts of the history/mythology of global society, if not shared then at least something we’re collectively aware of. Yet, being in these places in 2006-08 and viewing the hustle and bustle around me there were times I could not have felt farther away from anything mythological. In fact, I think the thrust of the poem is the encroachment of the quotidian into any grander ideas we have of the world.

In “Mythos (Deployment),” Graham writes:

The epicenter
might be
a minaret
woman’s veil, voices
selling dates,
road-ways tamped
packed with feet
where waiting,
still the magnitude hits.
A thousand years stretch
down this street
this town, the same
ground waked by Paul
blinded he saw
God spoke place.
Words here make
sense only if kept
aside myths
in your head.
Camel rides, bouncing
in a pickup truck bed
as it passes.

To read the Sequestrum interview with Aaron Graham, please visit their site here.  Graham’s poems, “Mythos (Deployment” and “Footfalls” can be found here.

Aaron Graham hails from Glenrock, Wyoming, population 1159, which boasts seven bars, six churches, a single 4-way stop sign and no stoplights. His poetry represents a unique contribution to the arts and stands apart from the work of Brian Turner, Phil Klay, and other war poets in that it represents the experience of an enlisted United States Marine across three deployments and treats the subject matter of that experience on the front lines as a human intelligence operative, Arabic translator, and counterintelligence expert from within that frame, Aaron was recently the ‘Cecilia Baker Memorial Visiting Scholar’ for the 2016 Seaside Writer’s Conference. His chapbook ‘Skyping from a Combat Zone’ was Shortlisted for Tupelo Press’s 2016 Sunken Garden Prize. His first full length collection, “Blood Stripes”, was a finalist for Tupelo’s 2015 Berkshire Poetry Prize, his poem, ‘Olfaction’, won the Seven Hills Literary Journal’s Penumbra Poetry Prize, and ‘PTSD Poem #12’ has been nominated as ‘The Best of the Net’. Aaron founded and currently runs a weekly poetry workshop on writing the military experience for Veterans and their families at the Atlanta VAMC and continues to develop his poetry as a way of connecting with other veterans while finishing his PhD in Literature at Emory University.

CWW Alumni News: “The One Tip that Changed My Life” by Nannie Flores

Nannie Flores at the Château de Verderonne in Picardy, France

Nannie Flores, an alumna of the 2014 Château de Verderonne Yoga & Writing Retreat in Picardy, France, writes a haunting and powerful new essay, “The One Tip That Changed My Life” for Ideiya Magazine.  In the essay, Flores tackles the taboos associated with writing nonfiction, trauma, illness, and its aftermath.  In the essay, Flores writes:

Write as if your parents were dead.” In retrospect, there was something ominous and sinister about this piece of writing advice. At the time, it seemed harmless. So I took the tip when I was in college.

While in university, I wrote two one-act plays that touched on themes such as virginity and physical and verbal abuse in relationships. My parents watched the play, and they applauded along with the audience. The writing tip worked.

On the ride back home, when all the hype was over, they made sure to say they were proud of me, but that they disapproved of certain elements in my works. “Relationships are meant to be healthy,” Mama said. Papa gave his usual silent nod.

But what’s done is done. I have already written it and I didn’t need to ask for their approval…”  

Read the full essay on Ideiya here.

Nannie Flores is a playwright and nonfiction writer based in the Philippines.  Her essays and articles have appeared in EntrepreneurCosmo.ph, ABS-CBN News, Ideiya, Spot.ph, and Philippine Daily Inquirer.  You can follow her on her blog, The Fancy Delight.

Cambridge Writers’ Workshop feat. in The Independent (UK)

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to be featured in the British newspaper, The Independent, in their recent feature article, “World of Books: Ready to Write Your Own Best-seller?”  The article focuses on the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Summer in Granada Writing Retreat (Aug 2-6, 2017), and quotes Jennifer Howard’s feature from The Washington Post:

You’ve spent too many summers reading novels, isn’t it about time you started to write one yourself.  Jennifer Howard selects the best of the world’s writing retreats:

Summer in Granada is part of a series of retreats created by writers Rita Banerjee and Diana Norma Szokolyai. They describe their retreat model as a kind of roving salon, with previous sessions in Paris and at a chateau in Picardy, among its envy-inducing locations. “All of these places have a very alive and electric culture, a culture that exists on the streets, in the imagination,” Banerjee says.

To read the complete article, please visit the The Independent’s British edition here.  Applications and scholarships for our Summer in Granada Writing Retreat (Aug 2-6, 2017) are open until June 20, 2017.  Please apply at cww.submittable.com.

Granada2017PosterJune6 copy

Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Summer in Granada, Andalusia, Spain Writing Retreat featured in The Washington Post

Original illustration by Lisk Feng for The Washington Post

The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop is delighted to be chosen as one of the six best writing retreats for the summer in their recent feature, “When You’re Ready to Move from Summer Writing to Summer Reading.”  In the article, journalist Jennifer Howard writes:

Your boss doesn’t care if you finish your novel. Your partner would rather not hear about the memoir you’ve been threatening to write. Feeling discouraged? It may be time to escape the creativity-quashing grind and reconnect with your muse in a lovely locale.

Whether you like Midwestern lakes or Icelandic hot springs, there’s a writers retreat for you. Here are half a dozen programs where you can spend quality time with your journal or get started on the next bestseller:

For culture connoisseurs

If tapas and flamenco are more your thing, the Summer in Granada retreat, sponsored by the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, promises a warm cultural bath: “Let the old city stimulate your writing with its winding streets, Moorish history, and evocative landscapes,” the website says.

Summer in Granada is part of a series of retreats created by writers Rita Banerjee and Diana Norma Szokolyai. They describe their retreat model as a kind of roving salon, with previous sessions in Paris and at a chateau in Picardy, among its envy-inducing locations. “All of these places have a very alive and electric culture, a culture that exists on the streets, in the imagination,” Banerjee says.

This summer, participating writers will enjoy an “experiential tour” alongside workshops and writing sessions. Fiction writer Tim Horvath will teach a “writing from the senses” class that includes a visit to a “museum of smells,” a visit to a chocolatier and a tapas tour. “No matter how intellectual writing gets, you always want to draw in the senses and immerse the reader,” he says. (Did we mention chocolate?)

Cost/duration: $2,950; four nights. Some scholarships available.

To read the complete article, please visit the The Washington Post website here.  Print versions of the article will be available on June 11, 2017.

Applications and scholarships for our Summer in Granada Writing Retreat (Aug 2-6, 2017) are open until June 20, 2017.  Please apply at cww.submittable.com.